“She’d had a really rough life, a scandalous, tempestuous life. She had four children. Four marriages. She married her stepson and had children with him.”

Born in California in 1923, Gloria was the youngest daughter of British stage actress Jean Hallward, who groomed her for greater success. Her older sister, Joy, married Robert Mitchum’s younger brother, John.

By the time she had turned 20, MGM had signed Gloria on a seven-year contract and told her to use her mother’s maiden name.

She made her mark in her second film, 1946’s It’s A Wonderful Life, with James Stewart, as the flirty, Violet, and got an Oscar nomination for Crossfire the following year.

Despite her obvious allure, she was unhappy with her looks. She would stuff cotton pads or tissues under her top lip to make it look fuller and pad out any wrinkles. It was a trick her disgusted co-stars only discovered during kissing scenes.

Later she resorted to plastic surgery on her upper lip and she also had her chin reduced.

While her acting career was a big success, Gloria’s love life was a series of disasters.

In 1946 she filed for divorce from her first husband, actor Stanley Clements, after less than a year of marriage. Then he beat her up when they got back together.

In 1948, on the same day her annulment finally came through, she married Rebel Without A Cause director Nicholas Ray in Las Vegas.

Gloria was four months pregnant with their son Timothy, but the relationship was doomed from the start. Nicholas gambled away £30,000 in Sin City on their wedding night so she wouldn’t get her hands on it, and later admitted: “I was infatuated by her, but I didn’t like her very much.”

Three years in, that dislike turned to loathing when Nicholas walked in on Gloria in bed with his 13-year-old son Tony at their Malibu home.

The marriage imploded — although the reason why was kept secret for almost a decade.

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Her next trip up the aisle was with TV producer Cy Howard. It lasted three years and produced daughter Marianna, but was almost as stormy as her last marriage.

Gloria pulled a gun on Cy during one explosive row and cut up his clothes in another.

Hollywood turned a blind eye to all the scandals until 1962, when it was revealed that Gloria had married stepson Tony two years earlier in a secret ceremony in Mexico.

Publicly she was defiant, saying: “I married Nicholas Ray, the director. People yawned. Later on I married his son and from the press’s reaction you’d have thought I was committing incest or robbing the cradle.”

Gloria appeared with Hollywood legend Humphrey Bogart in the 1950 film In a Lonely Place

Privately, she was having a breakdown and endured electric shock therapy treatment to cure her depression. At the same time she was locked in a custody battle with Cy who claimed she was an unfit mum.

Her union with Tony lasted longer than any other. They had two sons, Anthony Jnr and James, and stayed together for 14 years. But Nicholas never forgave either of them and remained estranged from his son until the end.

In 1978, with her movie and TV career behind her, Gloria headed to London’s West End. She was staying in digs in North London when she met and fell for jobbing actor Peter Turner.

He recalled: “First friends and then lovers, we were an unlikely couple, and not just because she was almost 30 years older than me and had been married four times.

A year later he finally discovered why the once vibrant woman had become secretive and pushed him away — Gloria had been diagnosed with breast cancer and not told him.

Peter got a call from a theatre in Lancaster, where she was appearing, to say Gloria had collapsed and was in hospital.

Believing that all she needed was bed rest and refusing all medical help, she asked Peter if she could stay with his family in Liverpool.

He says: “So began the sad six days in which Gloria lay dying upstairs in my parents’ house while I defied her wishes and contacted her eldest children and let them know that they needed to come as soon as possible.”